Foule Sentimentale

Imagine, if you will, that eight characters walk into a bar, and more than people, they are instead sketches of themselves. This doesn't stop them from forming very recognizable relationships: they experience attraction, friendship, doubt, existential dread, and all bounce off of one another in the course of one night. The archetypes, like cards plucked from a deck, twist to fit the setting: the divine feminine in a jazz singer (the Empress), the repressed businessman who wants to save her (the Emperor), the bartender-as-jester and staunch optimist in love (the Fool), the too-devoted friends of these (the High Priestess and Hierophant), the charming and stagnant cynic (the Hanged Man) and the exasperated salaryman chasing highs as well as lows (the Chariot). We follow these rotating conversation partners in the company of mellow jazz and liminality. We see performed a confrontation with both a hopefulness but also a futility to human connection. Foule sentimentale is a moderately absurd play about moderately absurd people, making varyingly absurd gestures in the direction of meaninglessness, and reckoning with it. It’s a conversation about love where love is not the goal, momentum that goes nowhere, and one unanswerable question: for what reason?